INTERVIEW WITH PETER ARMSTRONG
CBC NEWS ON THE MONEY
NOVEMBER 7, 2016
PETER ARMSTRONG: Well thank you so much for coming in. It’s great to see you. To what extent is food the best or maybe least biased glimpse into how a society, a country, an economy works?
ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Well there’s nothing more political. There’s nothing more revealing of the real situation on the ground, whether a system works or not. I mean, whatever your philosophical, uh, the foundation of your personal belief system, it’s difficult to spend time in Cuba, particularly like ten years ago, eat with ordinary people, and come out of it thinking “Wow, this system is really working out for everybody.” [Armstrong laughs] Who gets to eat, who doesn’t get to eat, what they’re eating—I mean, the food itself on the plate is usually the end result of a very long and often very painful story. I mean, is there a lot of food preservation, is there a lot of pickling? You know, certain countries, their cuisine very much reflects either a siege mentality, or abundance, or intermittent periods of difficulty. Also people just—if you go in not as a journalist but just as someone who’s asking simple questions like, “What do you like to eat? What makes you happy?” people tend to drop their defenses and tell you extraordinary things that are very revealing.
ARMSTRONG: And where do you get this stuff—I mean, the production chain, and how you get all this food, tells you so much about how an economy functions, doesn’t it?
BOURDAIN: Well, I think maybe the strongest example that snuck up on us when we were shooting in Egypt before the Arab Spring, we wanted to shoot a scene with fūl, which is the everyday food of working-class Cairo. And our fixers and local translators suddenly were all up in arms. “No no no, you must not shoot this. You can’t shoot fūl.” I said, “Wait, it’s ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. It’s not interesting.” We said, “No, we’d really like to shoot it.” They said “It’s forbidden. We’ll kick you out.”
We ended up getting the shot anyway through various devious strategies, but I think what they were concerned about was they understood that it’s not just typical, it’s all there is to eat. And the army controlled, I guess, the flour supply, there’d been bread riots. And they were not so much worried about how it would look outside of the country, but the show is aired within the country, and I don’t think they wanted their own people seeing it. Particularly after an episode of the same show shot in France.
ARMSTRONG: You fly into a country—especially for this show—you’re trying to sort of understand a new place, you’re trying to explain a new place to viewers like us. When you go to a place for the first time, you get off the plane, you go downtown, do you go high-end food? Do you go street meat?
BOURDAIN: No, it’s what’s most typical. A good starting point is always the market, early morning markets. See what’s seasonal, what’s available, what people are buying. Also there are usually little food stalls that are serving people who work in the market. People talk to you in environments like that, generally in a good mood, open to try out their English if that’s interesting to them. Yeah, I’m not interested in high-end restaurants in general. Unless it’s something really unusual and extraordinary and new that says something in and of itself. That there’s an emerging haut-cuisine in Mexico, for instance, that’s really interesting to me. But generally speaking, no, that’s not what I’m looking at first.
ARMSTRONG: And again, the markets sort of help you understand—you know, we were talking about Gaza off-air—that it’s the fishing is the primary thing, you know, the fish are coming in, that’s how people are making their living, that’s how people are, sort of, trading and making their way in the world.
BOURDAIN: But, you know, as soon as you’re at the fish market—well, they’re getting their fish two ways. Within the one mile—I think it’s a mile limit—because if they go beyond a mile they risk getting their boat sunk. Or through the tunnels from Egypt. Already, the subject is fraught with peril. It’s extremely controversial. But it’s the sort of thing that, on my show, I get the comment to “Stick with food, man. We don’t want to hear politics from you. You’re a chef, you know, shut up, we don’t want your political opinion.” Okay, fair enough, but it’s difficult to not notice the elephant in the room. “How come you only have these fish?” “Well, we can’t go any further out to sea.” You know, “How come you’re missing two of your limbs in Laos?” “Well, you know, when I was a little boy, I was walking around in a field and stepped on one of the eight million tons of ordnance you guys left in my country.” Look, those are inescapable facts. How you choose to feel about them or interpret them, is up to you.
ARMSTRONG: And your audience, certainly on the television show, has come to expect that, and to really sort of appreciate that it’s this guided tour that isn’t a political documentary about a world, but it’s a glimpse into a society. Is the book a similar vein, that you get to learn more about a place by cooking and by experiencing?
BOURDAIN: This is more of when I’m not out there in the world. This is the little place that I keep for myself. It’s what I cook when I’m cooking for a nine year old and her friends, and when I’m cooking at home and sort of comforting myself and a few friends and family.
ARMSTRONG: You said in an interview I read a couple days ago that you’ve changed your take on brunch as a result of having a kid.
BOURDAIN: Well, I hated brunch because for many years of my life, for many low points in my professional career, when I was sort of unemployable by any reputable restaurant for various reasons, I could always get a brunch gig. Because restaurants are always desperate to find somebody to cook three hundred omelettes for drunks on Sunday morning, and that was me. And so the smell of eggs cooking and French toast was always the smell of shame and defeat and humiliation until I became a dad. And now, if I want the fast track to looking cool in front of my daughter’s friends, it’s make a pancake bar for them, you know, “Your choice: chocolate chip, blueberry, banana?”
ARMSTRONG: [Laughing] What fun you can have, huh?
BOURDAIN: Yeah.
ARMSTRONG: I want to talk a bit about the TV industry and where you started and where it’s going now. You’ve been making these kinds of shows for a while and have had great success at them. What has changed over that period of time to where we are now?
BOURDAIN: Well I can only really tell you what changed for me. I think there are certain hard and fast rules of television. CNN, unlike everyone else I’ve ever worked for, have never called me up and started a conversation with “How about,” or “Have you thought about,” or “We’ve got an idea.” I have complete and total autonomy. I’m privileged to be able to go out there and make whatever shows I want wherever I want with zero interference.
But I think my previous experiences with two other networks are that everyone on television who works in the television industry by and large lives in fear. And what they’re afraid of is that someday they won’t be on television. So they’re not gonna try anything new, because, well, they’ll say they want something new, but what they really mean is the same thing that worked last year. Because they don’t want to be the guy who’s stuck out there having proposed something that doesn’t work. Everybody kind of adheres to what worked last year. The engine of television on the creative side was always “Do what worked last week.” Which is exactly the opposite of what interests me, which is to never repeat what I did last week, whether people liked it or not. But I’m kind of a freak in the business, in that a) I’m not interested in doing the same thing, even if it worked, and b) you know, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to not be on television anymore.
ARMSTRONG: That distance, I think, gives you great power in that relationship. But at the same time, does it give us a glimpse into where the art, the craft, and the business of television are going? There’s a success in this, and that, you know—emulate it people, get out there, follow this.
BOURDAIN: It’s a shrinking industry. It’s an industry under tremendous pressure from the digital universe. And again, people are “We want something new and proactive and young and crazy and out there”—but not really.
ARMSTRONG: “We don’t really want that.”
BOURDAIN: “We want it to be just like what’s working over there, only our own watered-down version.” Or “We’re just gonna step back and stick with what we know always works.” And there are certain rules, particularly in the food travel space. You know, if you did every show of people shoving barbecue into their face, that’s gonna be a hit show.
ARMSTRONG: My favorite quote about television was the old Hunter Thompson line about it’s the “shallow money trench.”* It is now, “If you’re going to do something as undignified as making television, it should be fun.” Which is a quote you gave to a colleague of mine at the Globe and Mail last week. Is it fun? Can you make television fun? And is that a sort of enduring lesson of making good television?
BOURDAIN: I don’t know whether it’s a lesson of making good television, but incredibly enough, it’s worked for me. For me, the satisfaction of television is largely a technical one. It’s about how can we do this show differently, how can we push ourselves creatively—not just me, but my camera guys, the post-production, the sound mixers and sound designers, the editors—how can we do something different? How can we outdo ourselves? How can we do something strange and wonderful that will confuse and terrify our network?
ARMSTRONG: Your show is largely about bridging cultures and learning more about someone else and somewhere else that maybe I’ll never go, or maybe now as a result of watching it I’ll get to go. Do you find yourself coming up on this growing sentiment of anti-immigration and xenophobia, these concerns about trade, the Trumps and Brexits, this rising sentiment in the world?
BOURDAIN: I bump into it a lot. Look, I think if you travel as long as I have and as much as I have, and you meet as many people and spend time with them in countries that we’re supposed to hate and who are supposed to hate us, when you see how similar—and different, but mostly similar—people are, particularly when sitting around a table. It makes it very, very hard—when you see how the economies of the world are completely interdependent and interlocked, and the flow of money back and forth—it’s hard to come back and not be horrified and dismayed by the willful, I mean willful ignorance of the kind of conversation we’re having now, often by people who know better. You know, Trump has—so much of his interests rest abroad and are completely dependent on other countries. It’s ludicrous for him to on one hand take this very xenophobic, protectionist point of view, that would make it impossible for his businesses to continue.
ARMSTRONG: Well, I’m afraid we have to leave it there, but thanks a lot for this conversation. It’s been a fascinating conversation.
BOURDAIN: Thank you.
* In his book Generation of Swine, Thompson said, “The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”